Nature of Light

This catalog, produced in conjunction with Sugimoto’s upcoming
exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, documents this important artist’s recent investigations on the science and the presentation of photography. Documenting in detail Sugimoto’s architectural and landscape design of the new Izu Photo Museum, the book is at once a reinvention of the artist as architect, as it is an insightful guide to Sugimoto’s interest in the earliest beginnings of photography. Instigated by the urging of his friend, Pop art icon Richard Hamilton, Sugimoto went to England to visit the museum of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process.
Finding common ground with Talbots’ polymathic interests in art and science, this book details images from Sugimoto’s Photogenic Drawing – Talbot pieces, where Sugimoto reinterprets 15 unprinted negatives from Talbot’s early studies, as well as 15 images from the artist’s Lightning Field series. Includes text by critic Minoru Shimizu.